Reviews by MathBrush

According to my rating system, I'm giving this game 2 stars. Here are my criteria:

-Polish. This game has several holes in implementation, enough to be annoying.

-Descriptive. This is where this game (and all of Sherwin's games) really shines. The game puts as a shallow gravedigger who only thinks about picking up women and digging up graves. You are extremely shallow and the game depicts that well.

-Interactivity. I think the game does well here. I felt like I hide control.

-Emotional impact. I didn't like all of the sex, and it made it harder to enjoy the rest of the game.

-Replay. I don't intend on replaying.

This game has you play as an artificial asexual human pursued by a manic dream pixie girl. You fight hand-to-hand, hack computers, and do other James Bond-type stuff.

However, like many Adrift games, this game requires a bizarre sequence of moves (with required commands like "reflect light beam at moon with lid")(not a real command). This is compounded by lengthy cutscenes, leaving the walkthrough with instructions like "Wait (x10)".

Overall, the general story is interesting, but relies heavily on overused tropes. I found it fun to read through with walkthrough though.

This game from IFComp 2005 was a pleasant surprise. You play as a retired clown trying to find his kids on a circus island.

It's simple and innocent fun, with varied locations and an honestly unique setting. The only other circus game I know well is Ballyhoo, and this is quite different from Ballyhoo.

However, it suffers a bit from 'walkthrough-itis'. It's pretty clear that the author had some awesome actions scenes and clever puzzles in mind, but the game doesn't really clue you into the required actions all that well.

I still enjoyed this game quite a bit.

This is a game almost all of whose problems could have been fixed with beta testing. The author did much of the work for a great game, but it's that testing and polishing that makes or breaks games.

This game has mislabeled exits, strange computation problems that make it chug to a snail's speed at times, unimplemented scenery items, guess-the-verb problems, and a 'kill people and impress women' play style that was never my thing. I was frustrated with playing, and one of the last things I saw was 'a cloud of liquid gas'.

But the core of the game is extensive worldbuilding and intricate characters. This could have been a great game. The author of this, 14 years later, could likely produce something truly marvelous. But I don't think this is it.

This game summarizes itself pretty well with this disambiguation text:

"Which do you mean, lymph nodes generally, the inguinal lymph nodes, the supraclavicular lymph nodes or the cervical lymph nodes?"

This is a game written by two medical students for the 2005 IFComp. They wanted to show exactly what it was like being a medical student, and they succeeded (as far as I know!) The game comes with both images and sound.

It's polished and descriptive, but there's no emotion and it's too confusing to be as interactive as I'd like. I played it quite some time ago, but for some reason I never reviewed it.

In the PTBAD series, which is generally an ill-conceived series of intentionally terrible games, this one manages not to be too terrible. It has generally smoothish implementation, not-too-hard main puzzle, and a poem that has crosses the line from awful to sublime.

Uses Adrift 4.0.

Santoonie Corp. was an interesting group in the early days of IF, and there are debates about whether the games released under their name are really there's or not. Suffice it to say, the games released under their name are poor quality.

This one is better than the other Amissville's, but still dreadful. There are TADS errors I've never even seen before for trivial actions. There is a fairly expansive map with some interesting scenes, but the scenes are built into the text description, so typing 'look' will repeat large chunks of action.

The story is nonsensical, something about hiding out in the woods and looking for weapons for your friend while being on run from the cops. Half of items are portable, the other half (often identical things to the ones you can carry) are 'too burdensome to carry'.

This is not the worst game I've ever played.

I played the French version of this game before. I like this game, it calls to my exact sort of tastes in games. But it may not call out to everybody. It's like Cannery Vale, which is one of my top 10 games of all time but which didn't win IFComp, or Creak, Creak, a tiny game by Chandler Groover.

In this game, you wake up in the middle of the night to strange sounds in the garden. You can explore your house, but everything seems off.

Great for fans of existential horror. Very short parser game.

This is an interesting game. With wordplay games, the question is, how can you make a game about wordplay that lasts long? One answer is to follow Emily Short's example and just put tons of content into a game (Counterfeit Monkey).

This game achieves its length through unfairness. Parts of this game (it's basically several mini-games put together) are wonderful: Buy the Farm was particularly good, as was the Shopping Bizarre. Those two would make a wonderful game pulled out on their own, one relying on American English sayings and the other on homonyms.

Some parts of this game don't make any sense. I didn't understand In a Manor of Speaking (which btw is also the name of a great Hulk Handsome game) at all, and looking it up, I still haven't found a good explanation at all. I believe having the Doldrums was a mistake, because it made you think everything else had a gimmick (like Gary Larson's infamous Cow Tools cartoon).

But if the game wasn't unfair, it wouldn't last very long. The only way I've seen fair wordplay games achieve length is through tons of content, like I said. Andrew Schultz does this with exhaustive code-enhanced wordspace searches. Shuffling Around is a good example of this.

I also like the Act your Part session. It was nonsensical, but I was able to get a lot of points just doing dumb stuff.

I played the version released by Zarf who was re-releasing Jason Scott's releasing of previously unreleased Infocom releases.

This game is short but satisfies all of my requirements for 5 stars:

Polish: This game has a custom format with well-designed buttons and overall CSS and layout.

Descriptiveness: There are several characters who are described in exquisite detail (or not, with good reason), and the location and item descriptions were evocative.

Emotional Impact: I could really identify with the researcher and the anomaly. The final description complemented the main narrative in an excellent way.

Interactivity: This game allows quite a few paths, but is self-deprecative. It says: (Spoiler - click to show)This may be a multiple-choice story, but there's no multiple endings. If you pick the wrong options, the story has to pretty much drag you to me so we can have this little chat. You see, fundamentally, this just isn't a good multiple choice story. That's not what it is. It was never supposed to be that. A good multiple choice story has decisions, it has character development, it's got different pathways to get to different goals and most importantly it's got replayability. There just has to be at least one ending where you die. It's a game, and there's a different way to play every time. This is not a game. These are special containment procedures. And these procedures make a very bad game, but they do a very good job of containing me.

Coincidentally, I disagree with the game's self-identification as a bad game and with its overall design philosophy. The material in the spoiler is only one way of doing things.

Replay: I enjoyed this both times I replayed it.